LinkedIn's Wend is a word puzzle on a small letter grid: you link letters that touch (up, down, left, right) into hidden words, and every letter has to be used exactly once. Words can bend around corners and around gray blocks.
You only get one official board a day, so I made a free practice version, Wend Unlimited, with 450 of my own boards in three levels, plus a daily board that's the same for everyone. The hard part was making sure every board has exactly one answer. Here's how the generator works.
The shape of a board
Each level is a grid size plus four word lengths that fill it:
| Level | Grid | Word lengths | Letters | Blocks |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Easy | 4×5 | 3, 4, 5, 6 | 18 | 2 |
| Medium | 5×5 | 4, 5, 6, 7 | 22 | 3 |
| Hard | 5×6 | 5, 6, 7, 8 | 26 | 4 |
The blocks are just the cells left over.
1. One path through every open tile
Drop the blocks on random cells, then find a single path that visits every open tile. If that path exists, cutting it into pieces gives word-shaped routes that, together, use every letter.
Finding the path is a depth-first search with Warnsdorff's rule: from the current tile, try first the neighbour that has the fewest onward options (ties broken at random). It's the same idea used for knight's tours, and it finds a path on these small boards almost instantly. A step budget (4,000 moves) gives up on bad block layouts, and a new layout is tried.
2. Cut the path into words
Shuffle the four word lengths and cut the path into pieces of those lengths. Each piece gets a random word of the right length, written in either direction along the piece. Words come from my own list of about 660 everyday words (CUP, BREAD, PENGUIN…), with no obscure or offensive entries.
3. Check that the words fit only one way
This is the step that matters. The same letters often appear more than once on a board, so a word might be traceable along several routes, and a different combination of routes might also cover the board. That would give two valid answers.
The check:
- For each word, list every route on the board that spells it, moving only between touching tiles.
- Search for sets of routes, one per word, that don't overlap and cover every tile. Start with the word that has the fewest routes, which keeps the search small.
- Keep the board only if there is exactly one such set.
About 40% of generated boards pass on the easy level, about a quarter on medium and about one in six on hard. Every attempt takes only milliseconds, so 150 boards per level take a few seconds.
4. In the browser
The game is vanilla JavaScript drawing an SVG grid:
- Drag across touching letters, or tap them one by one.
- When the letters you've linked spell one of the hidden words, it locks in with its own colour.
- Hint reveals one more letter of the shortest word you haven't found.
- The daily board is chosen from a fixed shuffle by the visitor's local date, so no server is needed.
Try it
The boards from this generator are playable at Wend Unlimited. They're my own boards in the same style, not LinkedIn's, and the site isn't affiliated with LinkedIn.
This post was written with the help of AI, and the project was built with an AI coding assistant. The numbers above are taken from the actual code and measurements.
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